


We Are Electric

by Crystalshard



Category: Tron - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:49:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/665266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crystalshard/pseuds/Crystalshard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for tanks4thememory, and the Tron Female Character Ficathon. Tanks asked, "What does the 'Voice of the Grid' look like?" Which got me wondering . . . just what <em>is</em> the Voice of the Grid?</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Are Electric

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tanks4thememory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanks4thememory/gifts).



> **Written For:** tanks4thememory  
>  **Era:** Legacy/Uprising 'verse, could be taken from any point past the coup.   
> **Genre:** Gen  
>  **Rating:** G  
>  **Warnings:** Some very mild fridge horror, depending on your perspective.  
>  **Summary:** Written for the Tron Female Character Ficathon. Tanks asked, "What does the 'Voice of the Grid' look like?" Which got me wondering . . . just what _is_ the Voice of the Grid?  
>  **Title:** We Are Electric

_"For your own safety, please remain calm . . ."_

Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness, a train stuttered and slowed, sending an error message to her. Its cry for help triggered a preloaded message designed to reassure the programs riding it, and she forwarded a call to the programs who were the hands she did not have. She was there, with the train program, with the _other_ programs looking around in alarm, with the teams trying frantically to correct the error before inefficiency could cause greater delays. All she could give were the preloaded sequences, the words that never quite matched every situation, but she gave them anyway. It was what she was written to do. 

_"Round three, Combatants Two and Eight versus . . ."_

She shuffled the combat pods apart and back together, assisted by the lesser programs that were the Arena's control system. Her younger sisters gave her the cue for the announcements, and it was correct, as always. She was there, speaking above the roaring crowd, with the four programs who held live discs that hummed in their hands. She did not wonder what it would be like to fight the way that these were doing, for she was not programmed to wonder. Only to carry out her function. 

_". . . minor technical difficulties . . ."_

Elsewhere, a series of public terminals went dead as the overloaded data connections shut themselves off in accordance with safety measures. She was there, with the baffled programs, sensing the odd blankness as part of herself was cut off from the rest. If she had been more aware, she would perhaps have disliked the feeling of the loss, but her awareness was only of the Grid. She simply set alerts and let it fade into archive; repairs would happen or not as the Admin decreed. 

_". . . commence lightcycle battle in three . . ."_

Ten glowing light-trails adhered to her floor, the lightcycle arena shifting and changing under the wheels of the 'cycles as she accepted the orders of other programs and commanded the stadium control programs to alter it to their will. She was there, part of that changing landscape, registering the binary switch of lightcycles passing over the arrow-like indicators. She listened to the escaping sound that registered beyond the stadium walls, passing back the data for the stadium programs to adjust the sound baffles that shielded against the changing ebb and flow of the noise from the crowd. 

_"Warning. Warning. Warning . . ."_

She was everywhere, invisible, silent, uncomplaining, the heart of the code. Each facet was one among many, and she responded as she was programmed to do, juggling the system's demands in the numerous operations that she carried out from microsecond to microsecond. She was the system's most powerful program . . . and yet, perhaps also its most limited. She would never walk among the programs on the trains, never hold a disc, never say something that was her own thought and not part of her .dll. She needed no thoughts to do what she did. 

Flynn believed that all programs were the kind that he saw walking around. He had written _her_ , and yet still did not realize that she and her siblings – the trains, the Arena and stadium controllers, the numerous lesser algorithms that handled data transfer and archive access – were as much programs as those that had faces. 

She did not mind, and nor did they, for there was nothing to envy. They were designed to do their jobs, and they did them well. It did not matter that they had no faces, no hands, no voices other than their libraries of audio samples. 

They _were_ the Grid.


End file.
